Column by Robert Weibezahl

I have to admit I was a bit nonplussed when Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in 2013. Not because she didn’t deserve it. On the contrary, no writer is more worthy of this crowning literary honor. No, my dismay stemmed from the fact that the secret had gotten out: For years, we Munro fans had fooled ourselves into thinking we were part of some exclusive society with special appreciation for an unsung master. Crazy, of course, since Munro had been reaching tens of thousands of readers for decades with her stories in The New Yorker. But such is the unvarnished assuredness of Munro’s prose, the knowing intimacy of her plots—it is easy to believe she is writing for you alone.

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

January 19 marked the bicentennial of Edgar Allan’s Poe’s birth and, predictably, publishers have observed the occasion with new books honoring the American master.British biographer and novelist Peter Ackroyd offers a scaled-down biography, Poe: A Life Cut Short, the latest in the Ackroyd’s Brief Lives series. Given the book’s concision, Ackroyd does an admirable job...

Well Read Column by Robert Weibezahl

"Like all children, I was born into the middle of a story I didn't know, and I was raised to be unknowing, tranquil in its center," observes Hong, the narrator of Lan Samantha Chang's shimmering pearl of a novel, Inheritance. "But glimpses of this story reached my eyes." From those glimpses, Hong pieces together the turbulent, multigenerational drama of her Chinese family in the years before...